Rotting bodies spoil Baghdad's taste for river fish

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - River fish are off the menu in Baghdad.

Dead bodies frequently pulled from the River Tigris have dulled the Iraqi capital's appetite for Masqouf, its popular dish of grilled carp, after clerics reportedly warned that the fish dined on rotting corpses.

"They spread rumors about the fish, that they eat the bodies of drowned people, but this is just a rumor," said Hussein Ahmed, a 62-year-old fisherman, after setting his nets within sight of the heavily fortified Green Zone compound on the banks of the Tigris.

Scores of corpses turn up every week in Baghdad, victims of unrelenting violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs that is pushing Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war.

Many are dumped in the Tigris, which flows through the heart of the city and was once lined with restaurants specializing in the Masqouf that people loved to eat on a Friday night.

Most riverfront eateries closed long ago, magnets for insurgent bomb attacks that are part of life in Baghdad since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The fishermen who have relied on the Tigris for generations can still be seen casting nets beneath the city's bridges and beside the river's reed beds and sandbars.

But these natural fish feeding points also snag floating corpses, and Baghdad's river fishermen know the war has tainted their livelihoods as well.

"People have started to leave the fish of the river because of the bodies ... the trade of fish has been totally changed," said Yassir al-Qurayshi, 36, at a fish stall in the upscale Karrada neighborhood of central Baghdad.

A fatwa, or religious edict, forbidding Iraqis to eat fish from the Tigris was reported by Iraqi media recently, but tracing its original source has been tricky.

Prominent Shi'ite clerics in the holy southern city of Najaf on Tuesday denied any knowledge of the edict. Officials from the government office representing powerful Sunni imams who run Iraq's Sunni mosques were not immediately available for comment.

Many residents in Baghdad have turned to healthy looking carp such as those flapping in the shallow water of a display tank on one street. Each weighs around one kilo (2.2 lbs). Nearby, a man grills racks of them above a log fire.

Such fish have been farmed in a freshwater pond well away from the muddy water of the Tigris.

"This new (fatwa) forbidding the fish of rivers, because the rivers contain bodies, really affects the market and now we just eat fish from ponds," said Saifaddin, a local customer.

Rotting corpses are not the only thing to have affected the river fishing since the war.

"People have started fishing using electricity and explosions, so people don't like fish from the river any more. They prefer fish from the ponds," said Qurayshi.